Short Selling

Taking advantage of the steepest drop in three decades, Chinese mothers have shored up prices by splashing out on gold for their daughters' weddings in the past couple of weeks, foiling the plan of finance gurus who have been short selling the precious metal in the hope of pushing it lower.

Almost 60,000 applicants are eagerly waiting to find out if their number has come up in the ballot for flats in the Housing Society's latest project. Some 988 flats will become available at Greenview Villa in Tsing Yi.

Short sellers of Hong Kong-listed securities are now required to report their short positions to the Securities and Futures Commission, which publishes the data. To discourage free-riding and herding, where investors blindly follow a big-name short position holder, names of the short sellers are not revealed and the data is aggregated for each stock.

There are many animals that people find repulsive which actually play a vital role in sustaining their ecosystems.

Take hyenas: reviled for feeding on carrion that even vultures leave behind, these grotesque creatures (the female spotted hyena even sports an organ known as a pseudo-penis in place of more conventional genitals) support many far more picturesque species.

No one likes short-sellers. These are people who profit when stock markets crash, leaving big holes in your investment portfolio. Since August, governments in South Korea, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium have moved to restrict or ban shorting.

Seven brokerage bodies yesterday lobbied the government to follow the example of some European and Asian markets and ban short selling, citing the benchmark Hang Seng Index's more than 25 per cent loss over the past two months.

The Securities and Futures Commission said yesterday it would seek legislation requiring fund houses and institutional investors to report their short-selling positions in Hong Kong-listed securities as part of an international effort to tighten regulation on the activity.

Mainland investors snubbed proposed market-boosting measures by the government and drove the Shanghai index down 5.23 per cent yesterday, when trading resumed after a week-long suspension for the National Day holiday.

China Shanshui Cement Group, the largest maker of the building material in Shandong province, raised HK$1.82 billion from its initial public offering after pricing the deal near the bottom of the indicative valuation range amid a tough capital market environment, sources said.